I can understand the Nutella and kittens. It's the videos of beheadings, mass executions, and burning a person alive that I have trouble with. How can that be a recruiting tool? How many Charles Mansons are there on the earth?

Purpose one: The murder videos are recruiting ads. IS leaders believe the videos visually demonstrate their undeterrable will to kill in order to secure and expand radical Islamist power. The videos apparently persuade young, alienated Muslim men. Best guesses indicate IS has attracted from 20,000 to 40,000 European, North American and Asian Islamist volunteers.

IS videos leverage al-Qaida's dark psychological insight. Al-Qaida connected the Muslim world's angry, humiliated and isolated young men with a utopian fantasy preaching the virtue of violence. That utopian fantasy seeks to explain and then redress roughly 800 years of Muslim decline.

Which leads to purpose two. Murdering helpless captives shocks, insults and angers civilized human beings. IS leaders, however, love to shock and insult. To shock and insult means to defy restrictions. In its war against infidels, IS recognizes no restrictions. If this sounds a bit like a 19th-century European anarchist political trope, indeed it is.

A lot. Thousands. Among other things, polygamy leaves a lot of young men sexually frustrated. Why do you think 72 virgins are important?"

jr: "You can't chop off heads all day" True..that's what begat Nutflix and The Beheading Channel.By the way, did they focus group the head shaving prep of hostages? Seem to leave their hair untouched now. Maybe just a time issue. Busy, busy.

I suppose this is obvious, but isn't ISIS great?: It attracts batshit Islamists from all over the world and concentrates them in Syria and Iraq where they can be slaughtered without doing damage to anything over here.